"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.
Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?
I've noticed a number of pieces lately that seem to suggest that managers and leaders doing nothing is actually good. It's been this way for a while - "bring me solutions, not problems" is the classic boss's abdication, placing themselves above their teams as judges and deciders rather than leaders - but I wonder if this current glut is caused by AI anxiety. After all, if your job is to just choose between options that other people will implement, why not have Claude do that? But if it's a good thing for your boss to do nothing, maybe he can keep his job.
I was never taught that servant leadership should be some weird "manager as parent" relationship.
Instead, servant leadership implies the manager serves the team (as the name implies). That includes removing impediments, but also includes empowering the team, ensuring their careers are growing, etc.
I honestly have never heard anyone—even those executing it poorly—try to frame Servant Leadership the way the original author did here (the "curling parent" analogy).
I have certainly seen people fail badly at practicing this style, but that failure was invariably due to a lack of character, poor communication skills, or other individual execution matters, not an issue with the core concept of servant leadership itself.
It’s the concept of a management chart as an inverted pyramid with each layer holding up and supporting the layer above them. If you imagine a promotion as working your way down the corporate pyramid, then it’s easier to see how the managers at the bottom are carrying more weight and deserving of higher pay.
As opposed to a pyramid where it’s visually represented as the broader management layers supporting the layers above them.
In a pyramid, it looks like the CEO has a cushy, overpaid job. In an inverted pyramid it looks like they have the weight and responsibility of the company on their shoulders.
You see, this only works in orgs that don't suck. It breaks down the moment employees must be manipulated in some way to the benefit of the company and to the detriment of the employees. Unfortunately a regular occurrence even in countries that have employee protection laws.
This is just trying too hard. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword invented to divert the general opinion from the power mechanics that hierarchical organizations are funded upon, i.e., the boss (sorry, leader) commands and the direct reports execute. Being "servant" basically just means being a decent human being, as per putting people in the right condition to carry out their duties, not coming up with unrealistic expectations, and do the required 1:1 coaching/mentoring for career development.
Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc.
This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."
This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.
I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".
Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
Friendly reminder that management exists to get you to justify your expensive pay check. Every employer-employee relationship is adversarial. Adjust accordingly.
>> but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
Managers definitely need to contribute and this is a great way to do so, and also build credibility with your team. You don't get the fun or deep technical problems; that's not your job, but you can fulfill whatever transparent leadership is (I think?) by protecting your team from the noise (i.e. the shit umbrella) and contributing in a supporting role (the servant part). The hard / tiring thing is doing this consistently and repeatedly.
It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:
"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy.
A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."
While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power.
I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power.
As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders.
Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.
The biggest issue in the post is "creates direct links between supply and demand". One of the more important things to do as a manager is sit in hours of meetings so your reports can get a fifteen minute synopsis about the decisions made. And represent your reports in those meetings.
I(we) call that running interference, and it has always been an extremely high value activity. The people who see the benefit rarely complain. I myself have always recognized it as valuable.
There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.
The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.
How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.
I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.
Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
For me the useful bit of servant leadership isn’t the religious origin, it’s the reversal of default: you’re not “above” your reports, you’re in service to them and the mission
Can’t wait for AI Slack plugins to replace all low tier middle managers. You can achieve so much transparency since the data is already out there anyway.
There has to be a better way to organize how ICs communicate. More productivity to unlock.
Author gives own take on what they thinks servant leadership means, then invents a supposedly different kind of leadership that is just servant leadership, taken into a different context than the original church one, then gives it a new name, one that doesn't really tie into their definition.
The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
I'm pretty sure software development of a website doesn't translate to a life and death situation that US army is dealing with. If anything it's why there is so many managers who think this works as if we are solving lives so they have to be strict and we all have to be strict and everyone needs to have their story points updated.
The reason why most people went into software development is because they like building stuff so you have to inspire that - it's quite different to why people join US army.
My 2 cents on the actual manager philosophy is that it depends on the organization and the personal and cultural differences of the team members, some people like leaders, some people like servants and some like equality.
At the end of the day everyone has to be aware they do work for the business and why they do stuff. The manager has to make that aware and inspire people.
I think were it rewritten with the current leadership, the very first thing they'd remove would be this topic line:
> Army professionals recognize the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and treat them with respect
Both in political and corporate (especially tech) leadership, this principle has proven to be convenient to say and equally convenient to be tossed aside with the slightest provocation - people are seen as consumers, workers, undesirables, or chattel, not as beings with dignity, that is only for people in privileged positions.
Not only that, read the chapter on counterproductive leadership (toxic leadership). Try to tick the boxes for the current US president. Spoiler alert, he ticks all the boxes.
Is this really what they use to train commanding officers? It has all the hallmarks of a self-help book - vague advice coupled with some anecdotes - with a lot of bureaucratic fluff inbetween. How/why did the squad leader 'instinctively know' how to handle the reluctant machine gunner? Isn't that the opposite of training military personnel?
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is. I identify as such, but I also do just about all of the "Transparent Leadership" things called out in the article. I may have to re-evaluate my orientation.
There's only one place I disagree and that's when it comes to empowering the team to do every last thing within your charge ("become redundant"). Depending on the organization, there are some actions that only a manager is empowered to do. Someone still needs to be present to weigh in on disputes/arguments, break ties, handle performance, reviews, interviews, PIPs, dismissals, and handle _other_ managers when necessary. It's simply not possible delegate these things and in the case of dealing with other managers, can imperil a person's employment.
Also, I would caution anyone to avoid directly comparing management to parenthood, even as a metaphor. A lot of people have terrible parents, and so model the worst behaviors: they can't nurture a houseplant let alone a human being. I've seen people like this bring the worst possible models for management into the workplace this way, and they do a ton of damage to businesses, psyches, and careers in return. Instead, I urge anyone to look to the carpenter/gardener dichotomy and how good leadership requires a bit of both:
This article is a great example of the Strawman Fallacy. I suppose it's a method to generate traffic but I would argue a key aspect of servant leadership is being transparent that you are in a role that should collectively support and lead to enable and expand the team.
I feel attributing any sort of parental concepts belittles the meaning here.
Coming from the Sales world sometimes I don't want to be taught to fish.
I'm coming to my VP for help because I already tried diff baits, went to diff ponds, and tried diff reels.
I'm coming for a fish finder not a lecture on maybe my casting was off
Not a great post, I’d not follow it if interested in leading teams long term.
A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”
If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?
Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:
- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.
- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc
- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.
Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.
In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.
Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.
IMO: I think there is a helpful distinction to be made between leadership and management. Leadership provides purpose and inspiration. Management provides, coordination and motivation. I’m not saying one person can’t do both.
I do agree that most management books read like parenting books - but I’d add that whats more important than the method is consistency in whatever approach you believe in. I’m not sure that managers/leaders will ever do that well relying on a book or a special ‘way’ they have read. They really need to have worked this out for themselves.
I think this has somewhat strawmanned “servant leadership,” which is more about humility in posture than purely intercepting annoyances and blockers, but nevertheless the conclusions are solid.
My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
A shit umbrella is not a two way block. It keeps shit from falling onto the employees but doesn’t prevent employees from knowing what is happening at higher leadership levels.
You do need to expose your team to some of the shit that's getting flung or else your team gets used to operating under clean conditions and loses its tolerance.
For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)
In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.
90 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 99.5 ms ] thread"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.
Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?
Instead, servant leadership implies the manager serves the team (as the name implies). That includes removing impediments, but also includes empowering the team, ensuring their careers are growing, etc.
I honestly have never heard anyone—even those executing it poorly—try to frame Servant Leadership the way the original author did here (the "curling parent" analogy).
I have certainly seen people fail badly at practicing this style, but that failure was invariably due to a lack of character, poor communication skills, or other individual execution matters, not an issue with the core concept of servant leadership itself.
It’s the concept of a management chart as an inverted pyramid with each layer holding up and supporting the layer above them. If you imagine a promotion as working your way down the corporate pyramid, then it’s easier to see how the managers at the bottom are carrying more weight and deserving of higher pay.
As opposed to a pyramid where it’s visually represented as the broader management layers supporting the layers above them.
In a pyramid, it looks like the CEO has a cushy, overpaid job. In an inverted pyramid it looks like they have the weight and responsibility of the company on their shoulders.
Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc.
This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.
I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".
Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
Managers definitely need to contribute and this is a great way to do so, and also build credibility with your team. You don't get the fun or deep technical problems; that's not your job, but you can fulfill whatever transparent leadership is (I think?) by protecting your team from the noise (i.e. the shit umbrella) and contributing in a supporting role (the servant part). The hard / tiring thing is doing this consistently and repeatedly.
"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy. A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."
While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power.
As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders.
Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.
I(we) call that running interference, and it has always been an extremely high value activity. The people who see the benefit rarely complain. I myself have always recognized it as valuable.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.
The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.
How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.
Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
So a hybrid of the two schools of thought might be better than either one (depending on the larger org).
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish… and you feed yourself. He’s a grown man. And fishing’s not that hard.”
There has to be a better way to organize how ICs communicate. More productivity to unlock.
https://talent.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ARN20039_...
The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
My 2 cents on the actual manager philosophy is that it depends on the organization and the personal and cultural differences of the team members, some people like leaders, some people like servants and some like equality. At the end of the day everyone has to be aware they do work for the business and why they do stuff. The manager has to make that aware and inspire people.
Team topologies Shapeup Sooner Safer Happier
I think those fit most companies.
I think were it rewritten with the current leadership, the very first thing they'd remove would be this topic line:
> Army professionals recognize the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and treat them with respect
Both in political and corporate (especially tech) leadership, this principle has proven to be convenient to say and equally convenient to be tossed aside with the slightest provocation - people are seen as consumers, workers, undesirables, or chattel, not as beings with dignity, that is only for people in privileged positions.
There's only one place I disagree and that's when it comes to empowering the team to do every last thing within your charge ("become redundant"). Depending on the organization, there are some actions that only a manager is empowered to do. Someone still needs to be present to weigh in on disputes/arguments, break ties, handle performance, reviews, interviews, PIPs, dismissals, and handle _other_ managers when necessary. It's simply not possible delegate these things and in the case of dealing with other managers, can imperil a person's employment.
Also, I would caution anyone to avoid directly comparing management to parenthood, even as a metaphor. A lot of people have terrible parents, and so model the worst behaviors: they can't nurture a houseplant let alone a human being. I've seen people like this bring the worst possible models for management into the workplace this way, and they do a ton of damage to businesses, psyches, and careers in return. Instead, I urge anyone to look to the carpenter/gardener dichotomy and how good leadership requires a bit of both:
https://www.intellicoach.com/ep14/
I feel attributing any sort of parental concepts belittles the meaning here.
I'm coming to my VP for help because I already tried diff baits, went to diff ponds, and tried diff reels. I'm coming for a fish finder not a lecture on maybe my casting was off
A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”
If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?
Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:
- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.
- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc
- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.
Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.
In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.
Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.
I do agree that most management books read like parenting books - but I’d add that whats more important than the method is consistency in whatever approach you believe in. I’m not sure that managers/leaders will ever do that well relying on a book or a special ‘way’ they have read. They really need to have worked this out for themselves.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)
In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.